The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  Regimental and staff appointments in London, Catterick and Scotland, where she was Adjutant of 317 (Scottish) Battalion WRAC of the Territorial Army, followed, before she went as a major to the WRAC training depot at Guildford as Chief Instructor in 1961. In September 1963 she joined HQ Middle East Command in Aden as the staff officer responsible for the conditions, discipline and welfare of soldiers and their families in South Arabia. The spring of 1964 saw the outbreak of rebellion by the Radfan tribes of the Western Aden Protectorate and a brigade and supporting units were sent there to deal with it.

  As staff officer responsible for the notification of casualties to the next of kin at home, she got herself up-country to see conditions for herself. Her straightforward way of questioning and no-nonsense attitude to roughing it were well remembered 40 years later when she became patron of the Aden Veterans’ Association.

  Two appointments in the MoD preceded her advance to lieutenant-colonel to become Assistant Director WRAC in the Army of the Rhine. In 1971 she was appointment Commandant of the WRAC College at Camberley, in the rank of colonel. The next three years projected her — and her increasingly confident personality — as an advocate for additional roles that WRAC officers could take on, relieving male officers for more dangerous work. The Northern Ireland emergency intensified during her tenure as college commandant, and she was quick to suggest new posts for women officers in the Province, some as hazardous as those undertaken by their male counterparts.

  The strain of the Northern Ireland emergency on the Army’s manpower ceiling finally broke the taboo on the wider employment of women in “teeth arm” units on active service. It had long been standard practice for a proportion of members of the WRAC to specialise in communications, supply and transport, and wear the insignia of the appropriate corps. As this system became extended, it was decided to carry it to the conclusion of women joining the corps in which they wished to specialise from the outset. Anne Field promoted this concept and put in the groundwork during her tenure first as Assistant Director at HQ UK Land Forces and then as Director WRAC from 1977 to 1982.

  Although another decade would pass before the WRAC was formally disbanded in 1992, much of the credit for initiating the changes to direct commissioning and “badging” was due to Field. In her honorary position as Deputy Controller Commandant to the Duchess of Kent — as Controller Commandant — from 1984 to 1992, she continued to contribute to the debate for this reform and served for a further two years as Deputy Colonel Commandant of the new Adjutant-General’s Corps, into which many WRAC women were absorbed, from 1992 to 1994.

  She was appointed an Honorary ADC to the Queen in 1977 and CB in 1979. (A decade earlier she would have been appointed DBE as head of her service.) After leaving the Army in 1982 she devoted herself to the interests of the WRAC Association and the ATS and WRAC Benevolent Fund, serving as chairman of Council from 1991 to 1997. She was appointed CBE (Civil) in recognition of her continued service to past and present members of the ATS and WRAC in 1995.

  She was a director of the London Regional Board of Lloyds Bank, 1982-91, a special commissioner of The Duke of York’s Royal Military School, Dover, 1989-2004, a member of the main grants committee of the Army Benevolent Fund, a Freeman of the City of London and a Liveryman of the Spectacle Makers’ Company.

  A woman of immense warmth and friendliness, despite a steely determination to bring about results she deemed necessary, she kept her friendships bright. Generals she had known since they were subalterns received, whether or not they welcomed it, the benefit of her advice and experience, but always delivered with a reassuring twinkle. She kept her finger on the Army’s pulse through living in London in retirement, but her holidays in the Lake District were sacrosanct.

  Her younger brother predeceased her.

  Brigadier Anne Field, CB, CBE, Director, Women’s Royal Army Corps, 1977-82, was born on April 4, 1926. She died on June 25, 2011, aged 85

  AMY WINEHOUSE

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  SINGER AND SONGWRITER WITH AN ASTONISHING VOICE AND TALENT, WHOSE CAREER WAS TARNISHED BY DRUGS, ALCOHOL AND SCANDAL

  JULY 25, 2011

  Out of the chaos of a deeply troubled personal life and an unhealthy predilection for self-destruction, Amy Winehouse fashioned a rare artistry to become the most talented British female singer of her generation.

  When she burst on to the scene in 2003, pop music was dominated by girl-next-door types such as Dido and Katie Melua. It was immediately evident that Winehouse came from a quite different tradition and her whisky-breathed, nicotine-stained bad-girl attitude, allied to a powerful and lived-in voice, revived the lusty, man-eating spirit of ball-busting but troubled divas of earlier eras such as Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin.

  The image could have been contrived but sadly it was all too dangerously real. Almost from the outset, she cut a doomed figure who lived on the edge. Yet along with the impression that she was never far away from self-destruction came real talent. She was just 20 when she made her breakthrough but her artistic maturity was remarkable as she married a thrilling jazz-soul voice of compelling conviction to a precocious songwriting talent.

  Success was almost instant. Within three years of her debut she had become the biggest female singer in Britain, showered with Ivor Novello and Brit awards and half a dozen Grammy awards for her two critically acclaimed multimillion selling albums. But she was also living up to her bad-girl image and was regularly photographed by the paparazzi falling out of her high heels as she left clubs considerably the worse for wear in the early hours.

  As it became increasingly obvious that she was finding it difficult to cope with fame, fears about her health spread. She shed her original, voluptuously full figure and became stick-insect thin, leading to much tabloid speculation. She later admitted that she was a manic depressive and suffered from eating disorders. Performances were abandoned when she appeared on stage intoxicated or concerts were cancelled at short notice with the singer pleading “exhaustion”, although on at least one occasion when she should have been on stage, she was then photographed drinking in a bar.

  Her notoriety was such that bookmakers began offering odds on whether she would turn up for her next gig. Instead of destroying her career, for a while her unreliability and much-publicised troubles only seemed to enhance her appeal. On her biggest hit Rehab she boasted of her refusal to seek help for her drinking. It appeared that much of her audience not only accepted her “unpredictability” as the by-product of a genuine artistry but indulgently admired her wildness as a not-unwelcome antidote to the cold calculation and manipulative spin of much of the rest of the pop world.

  But as the years rolled by without any sign of her getting her act together, the patience of even her most dedicated fans began to wear thin. Her sporadic concerts were often booed when audiences realised she was too drunk to deliver a professional performance. Her record company grew increasingly frustrated by her failure to follow up her triumphant 2006 album Back To Black, which won six Grammy awards.

  Amy Jade Winehouse was born in 1983 into a Jewish family in Southgate, North London. Her father Mitch was a taxi driver and her mother Janis a pharmacist, but there were several jazz musicians in the family and she grew up listening to such singers as Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald as well as to the pop music of the time. She also showed a precocious interest in performing herself.

  At the age of 10 she formed a rap duo with a schoolfriend called Sweet ‘n’ Sour, in the style of the black American female duo Salt-n-Pepa. She was Sour and her enthusiasm and precocious talent encouraged her parents to enrol her when she was 12 at the Sylvia Young Theatre School, where other famous former pupils include members of the Spice Girls and All Saints.

  However, the rebellious streak that was to become a trademark of her career asserted itself immediately and within a year she had been expelled for “not applying herself” and for defying school rules by piercing her nose.

  In 1997 she transfer
red to the Brit School in Croydon, another performing-arts college but where a more relaxed attitude to the creative process prevailed. While there she took guitar lessons and began writing her own songs. By 1999 she was already singing professionally. After her friend Tyler James, the singer, circulated her demo tape to a number of contacts in the music business, she signed a deal with 19 Management, owned and run by Simon Fuller, whose other clients included the Spice Girls and who went on to launch the Pop Idol TV series.

  He secured her a contract with Island Records, which in turn teamed her with the producer Salaam Remi to write and record her debut album, Frank. Released in October 2003, the album’s combination of jazz, funk and r&b received enviable reviews and excited flattering comparisons with everyone from Nina Simone to Erykah Badu. Her husky vocals exuded a potent sexual charge and her lyrics were wantonly honest and risqué, no more so than on I Heard Love is Blind. The song was about infidelity but found her professing no guilt as she explained: “What do you expect?/ You left me here alone/ I drank so much and needed to touch/ Don’t overreact/ I pretended he was you/ You wouldn’t want me to be lonely.”

  Amy Winehouse outside Westminster Magistrates Court in 2009, where she was on trial for an alleged assault on a woman at a charity ball

  Yet there was also warmth and a tongue-in-cheek wit alongside the feistiness and it seemed astonishing that she was only 20, for she sounded as if she had been singing the songs in jazz clubs every night for years.

  Critical acclaim was swiftly translated into commercial success and in early 2004 the album broke into the British top 20. She was also nominated for Brit Awards as best female solo artist and best urban act. She won neither but later that same year she scooped the prestigious Ivor Novello award for best contemporary song for Stronger Than Me, the album’s first single, which she co-wrote with Remi. Frank also made the shortlist for the 2004 Mercury Music Prize. But despite such accolades, Winehouse later said that she was “only 80 per cent” behind the album and complained that her record label had interfered by demanding the inclusion of certain songs and mixes she disliked.

  Back to Black, her second album, appeared in October 2006, exactly three years after her debut. It swiftly dwarfed the success of that earlier record, topping the British album charts and reaching No 7 in the US, at the time the highest debut entry for an album by a British female solo artist (a record soon to be snatched away by Joss Stone, who debuted at No 2 with her first album, Introducing Joss Stone).

  This time Remi shared the production credits with the New York-based Mark Ronson, while Winehouse’s jazz leanings were augmented by a new set of influences derived from a love of the classic “girl groups” of the 1950s and early 1960s. Among the album’s most potent songs was Rehab, a real-life drama about her own refusal to attend an alcohol rehabilitation centre, and which gave her a top 10 single in both Britain and America. The song was written in response to her management’s attempt to force her to attend a clinic and she fired them in protest.

  That she had an alcohol problem, though, was all too obvious. While promoting Back to Black she appeared intoxicated on Charlotte Church’s TV show and on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and garnered further lurid tabloid headlines when she drunkenly heckled a speech by Bono at the Q awards. She also got into a fight at her album launch party and later confessed that when she drank she became “an ugly dickhead”. Around the time of the release of Back to Black she also revealed that she was a manic depressive but refused to take any medication for the condition.

  She further confirmed rumours that she suffered from eating disorders, confessing to “a little bit of anorexia and a little bit of bulimia”. Photographs of her with scars on her arm, some old and some apparently freshly inflicted, also led to speculation that she was subject to bouts of self-harm.

  None of this hindered her success or harmed her record sales. In February 2007 she won a Brit award as best female artist and three months later Rehab won her a second Ivor Novello award.

  Her growing celebrity, however, only appeared to amplify her problems. During early 2007, she began cancelling concerts at short notice and with increasing regularity. On the day of one cancelled appearance she was photographed buying drink in her local supermarket in the morning and boozing in a Camden bar that night. In Australia, a performance was halted after one song when she vomited on stage.

  Part of her unhappiness was attributed to her estrangement from her boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil, but after a year apart they were reconciled and married in Miami in May 2007. Yet marriage did nothing to stem the chaos and the cancelled shows. Both were drug addicts and their relationship remained turbulent.

  “I’ll beat up Blake when I’m drunk,” she told a TV interviewer a month after they had wed. “I don’t think I have ever bruised him, but I do have my way. If he says one thing I don’t like then I’ll chin him.” They were eventually divorced in 2009.

  During the last five years of her life there was plenty of tabloid notoriety, legal troubles and numerous paparazzi pictures of her in various states of dishevelment and distress. But there was little new music.

  A cover of a Sam Cooke song appeared on a charity album and a version of It’s My Party was recorded for a Quincy Jones tribute.

  But despite repeated claims that she was starting work on the follow-up to 2006’s Back to Black, nothing appeared. She even announced she was setting up her own record label, Lioness Records, but all that emerged was an album by Dionne Bromfield, Winehouse’s 13-year-old goddaughter, on which she sang some backing vocals.

  Despite the defiance of the lyrics of her hit song, there were several attempts at rehab, the most recent of them only a few weeks before her death. Her short stay in a clinic was prompted by her need to get in shape for a European tour. In the event, the attempted return to the stage was a disaster; after being booed when she appeared too drunk to sing on the opening night in Belgrade, the remaining dates were cancelled.

  Amy Winehouse, singer, was born on September 14, 1983. She was found dead on July 23, 2011, aged 27

  WANGARI MAATHAI

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  SOCIAL ACTIVIST, ENVIRONMENTAL CAMPAIGNER AND THE FIRST AFRICAN WOMAN TO WIN THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

  SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

  Wangari Maathai was a courageous Kenyan environmentalist and social activist whose fight to preserve her country’s fragile forests led her into a battle against corruption and political oppression. She became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

  The environmental organisation that she founded, the Green Belt Movement, along with its team of mainly women helpers, planted more than 40 million trees in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Maathai’s message was simple: one person, one tree, and she worked tirelessly to build a sustainable relationship between human beings and the land. To her the tree was the practical solution to the complex causes of poverty and environmental degradation in rural communities. It also became an emblem of her struggle for peace, democracy and civil liberties, which threw her into direct confrontation with the regime of the Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi.

  Wangari Maathai was born in 1940 in Nyeri, a coffee-growing region in the shadow of Mount Kenya in the central highlands. She recalled as a child watching the destruction of wildlife and flora as the forests around her home were cleared to make way for commercial plantations. She was educated by nuns before winning a scholarship to study biology in the United States. She returned to Kenya and the University of Nairobi and became the first woman in the country to earn a doctorate, before being appointed a professor of veterinary anatomy, another first for Kenyan women.

  Her interest in the environment grew when she was called upon, as director of a branch of the Red Cross, to set up an environmental centre. In 1975 she became part of a group of women discussing issues to take to a UN conference on women and, having spoken to women struggling to gather enough firewood for fuel or clean drinking water, proposed the idea of planting trees to as
sist rural communities.

  Kenya’s delicately balanced ecology is dependent on the survival of its forest, especially for its water supply. However, after more than a century of environmental degradation, under the policies of the colonial British and post-independence governments, Kenya’s tree cover had shrunk to less than 2 per cent. Rivers, such as those flowing from the great Mau forest in the Rift Valley, began to dry up.

  Maathai, with a small group of women, set about planting trees on the land around schools, churches and their homes. Her idea was initially to provide a simple, cheap method of breaking the chain of poverty and environmental degradation, each exacerbated by the other. “It wasn’t something I had given much thought to,” she later said. “But it turned out to be a wonderful idea because it is easy, it is do-able, and you could go and tell ordinary women with no education: ‘OK, this is the tree. We’re going to observe the tree until it produces seeds. When they’re ready, we’ll harvest them. We’ll germinate them. We’ll nurture them. We’ll plant them in our gardens. If they are fruit trees, within five years we will have fruits. If they’re for fodder, our animals will have fodder.’ ”

  In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement with the aim of encouraging people, especially women, to plant trees and protect green spaces and forests for their communities. The number of planting groups were soon numbered in their thousands.

  However, it soon became clear to Maathai that the survival of the forests could be guaranteed only with a democratic, responsible system of governance. By the 1980s — with Moi in power and tracts of forest being consumed in illegal land grabs by his cronies and by state-backed deforestation — her conservation fight had become part of a much bigger struggle against the power abuses and endemic corruption of Moi’s regime.

  She was a fearless opponent, organising sit-downs and holding seminars to educate communities on how their land was being destroyed, as well as taking the government to court for illegal land grabs. In 1989 she took on one of Moi’s ministers and campaigned against his plans for a high-rise building on the green space of the Uhuru Park in central Nairobi. Her protest was violently broken up but she was successful and foreign investors withdrew their money. Labelled a “crazy woman” by the Moi regime, she was criticised for not behaving like a traditional African woman and interfering in male-dominated affairs. Her husband, with whom she had three children, divorced her, saying she was “too strong willed and educated”.